Advanced Math as Our Weapon

Students at Chicago’s Social Justice High School use advanced math to better understand the foreclosure crisis, gentrification and deportations affecting their community.

By Staff, Utne Reader

| July/August 2013

Infusing advanced math with concepts like subprime lending and outsourcing, Rico Gutstein hopes to not only prepare students for college, but also give them the necessary tools to become effective agents for change.Photo Courtesy Joe and Jeanette Archie

Henry Ford famously said that if ordinary people understood
how banking actually works “there would be a revolution before tomorrow
morning.” That’s more or less the idea behind Rico Gutstein’s critical math
curriculum at Chicago’s Social Justice High School
(“Sojo”). Infusing advanced math with concepts like subprime lending and
outsourcing, Gutstein hopes to not only prepare students for college, but also
give them the necessary tools to become effective agents for change.

Living in Chicago’s impoverished
Lawndale
neighborhood, Sojo’s students were already deeply familiar with concepts like
gentrification and displacement. In recent years high rents and new
construction have displaced many African American families in North Lawndale,
while South Lawndale’s Latino community has
been hit hard by deportations. But while students experienced social injustice
like this on a daily basis, understanding the economic realities behind it is a
different story.

That’s where advanced math comes in, says Gutstein. Writing
in Rethinking Schools (Spring 2013),
Gutstein describes how precalculus, algebra, and statistical analysis helped
his students makes sense of the displacement taking place in their community.
From the real cost of a subprime mortgage to the economics of immigration
policy, Gutstein’s students learned how to explore the raw numbers behind the
displacement they saw and experienced.

One of the cornerstones of Gutstein’s curriculum involved
calculating how much of a typical family’s mortgage payment actually reduces
their principal using an equation called a discrete dynamical system. Assuming
a $150,000 loan at 6 percent annualized interest, students found that for every
$808 monthly payment (the highest a typical family could afford in Lawndale), only $58 went
toward paying down the loan. What this meant was that after 30 years of
payments, a family could still wind up owing more than $90,000. Not only that,
when students compared these terms with new $285,000 condos being built in
North Lawndale, it was clear how working class families were being priced out.

-Advertisement-

Astonished by findings like this, students were eager to
share them in the class’ final unit. Toward the end of the year, students held
public forums to discuss what they had learned about subprime mortgages,
gentrification, and immigration with their families and neighbors. The
presentations, titled “Our People, Our Issues: Math As Our Weapon” argued that
while Lawndale’s
Latino and African American communities are exploited in different ways, they
“have common enemies and a common struggle.”

Share your thoughts.

Maureen Deprez

7/11/2013 4:59:19 AM

Let's hear it for math teachers! And for their students who actually master their courses..

rob denehy

6/28/2013 7:30:45 PM

Education in finance for the "common man" is long overdue. If concepts are explained clearly at the level of comprehension of the audience, there could be much better decisions made by the public. Instead, promoters use deceptive figures and complicated measures.